Thursday Morning News

Apple CEO Tim Cook has spoken about his position on encryption and privacy, telling Epic’s Champions of Freedom gathering event in Washington about guarding customer privacy, ensuring security, and protecting their customer’s rights to encryption. Cook opened with the line “like many of you, we at Apple reject the idea that our customers should have to make tradeoffs between privacy and security”, and went on to talk about how Silicon Valley culture was increasingly geared towards taking as much data as possible and trying to monetise it.

At WWDC next week, Apple will be unveiling the WatchKit SDK for native Apple Watch apps. What they won’t be revealing is revamped Apple TV hardware, with that scrapped from the list of rumoured announcements, according to the New York Times.

Even without a much anticipated hardware revamp, the Apple TV will still act as the central hub for HomeKit-enable accessories. Curiously enough the support document names third generation “or later” Apple TV as being compatible, but maybe Apple’s support document writers are just ahead of the game.

While there have been many repair extension and replacement programs, I don’t remember the last time Apple sent out an actual product recall. That makes the Beats Pill XL product recall a notable exception, but with the possibility of overheating and causing a fire hazard, I’m sure Apple is doing the right thing here.

The Tidal music streaming service has desktop apps that are now in beta, along with student pricing. In other media streaming news, Showtime’s digital-only standalone service will debut on the Apple TV — no word on whether it will be available outside of the US, but we’ll see on June 12.

IMore runs us through using the Ecobee3 smart thermostat, one of the first HomeKit-compatible accessories, with an iPhone.

MacStories says Fantastical on the Apple Watch is pretty great, bringing the same natural language event creation that you know and love from the desktop.

Pebble Time smart watches have started arriving, but unfortunately, the app hasn’t. Pebble says the app has been “in review” since late May, and is pushing its customers to appeal to Apple who control the entire App Store approval process.

Messages on iOS isn’t the only app to be affected by those crashing string bugs, with Skype across all platforms also affected by a similar bug. The only fix is to uninstall and reinstall the app entirely.